“It is immoral and unacceptable for my generation to keep adding to the national debt, expecting our grandchildren to foot the bill for our benefits for the rest of their lives.” So quoth Senator Romney. The Republican of Utah is speaking as a bipartisan, bicameral, group of legislators announced Thursday new legislation aimed at starting the process of closing the budget deficit and bringing down the national debt.

Nice to see Mr. Romney get down to this work — up to a point. He, after all, had his chance to take the lead in the campaign for honest money back in 2012, when he prevailed in the primaries against, among others, Congressman Ron Paul. Dr. Paul’s brilliant campaign cornered Mr. Romney into running on a platform calling for the creation of a monetary commission to work out a roadmap for restoration to our monetary system of an honest dollar.

In the event, the Beehive State Brahmin largely ignored the platform, shrank from trying to explain the problem to Americans, and on Election Day lost to President Obama. What a missed opportunity, not only to restore sound money — the historic basis of American prosperity — but also to address the origin of our spiraling federal indebtedness. That’s because our monetary crisis, seen in the dollar’s debasement, is inseparable from the debt crisis.

Under a gold standard, America’s money was convertible into specie — gold or silver — at a rate fixed by law. This monetary system, in its heyday, kept a tight lid on inflation — an average of 0.1 percent a year between 1879 and 1913, economist Michael Bordo reminds. The convertibility requirement also imposed a discipline on the federal government by serving as a de facto brake on spending and borrowing.  

Under a fiat currency regime, the dollar is undefined. It has no intrinsic value. It is a piece of paper, or a digital image on a computer screen. The Fed can conjure it till the market cries uncle. Severing the dollar from gold in 1971 ushered in an age of slow economic growth, global banking crises, and interest-rate drama, including a decade’s worth of zero percent borrowing costs, heaven for leverage artists like the former private equity titan, Mr. Romney.

This is the context in which to view the metastasized national debt, which has soared above $33 trillion, some 80 times the level when America abandoned the Bretton Woods version of the gold standard. It has more than doubled since 2012, when Mr. Romney flinched from the chance to steer America away from monetary debasement and indebtedness. Hence our lack of exuberance over his sermonizing about the morality of America’s pervasive red ink.

It was in the summer of 2012, after all, that the GOP platform called for a return to honest money, calling inflation “a hidden tax on the American people” and noting that “sound monetary policy is critical for maintaining a strong economy.” Influenced by Dr. Paul’s advocacy for central bank reform, the platform urged an “audit” of the Fed. The platform also called for a commission “to investigate possible ways to set a fixed value for the dollar.”

Mr. Romney was having none of it, giving a gold-backed dollar but “lukewarm support,” as the Wall Street Journal put it. “I’m happy to look at a whole range of ideas on how to have greater stability in our currency and in our monetary policies,” was the most enthusiasm the GOP non-standard-bearer could muster. He fretted that “someone has to decide what is the conversion rate between the gold and the dollar.” That someone, to start with, would be the market.

Mr. Romney overlooked that the dollar’s value is always measured in gold. That’s why the greenback has plunged to a 1,943rd of an ounce of gold, losing more than 98 percent of its value from a 35th of an ounce in 1971. The fiat nature of today’s dollars is the root cause of the wage stagnation, price inflation, and, yes, skyrocketing debt plaguing not only the federal budget but also highly encumbered businesses. A circumstance that is, yes, “immoral and unacceptable.”